iSound: Interactive GPU-based Sound Auralization in Dynamic Scenes

We present an auralization algorithm for interactive virtual environments with dynamic objects, sources, and listener. Our approach uses a modified image source method that computes propagation paths combining direct transmission, specular reflections, and edge diffractions up to a specified order. We use a novel multi-view raycasting algorithm for parallel computation of image sources on GPUs. Rays that intersect near diffracting edges are detected using barycentric coordinates and further propagated. In order to reduce the artifacts in audio rendering of dynamic scenes, we use a high order interpolation scheme that takes into account attenuation, crossfading, and delay. The resulting system can perform perform auralization at interactive rates on a high-end PC with NVIDIA GTX 280 GPU with 2-3 orders of reflections and 1 order of diffraction. Overall, our approach can generate plausible sound rendering for game-like scenes with tens of thousands of triangles. We observe more than an order of magnitude improvement in computing propagation paths over prior techniques.